What OS should I install on my 32mb(ram) laptop

I have aquired an old toshiba satalite pro laptop, I dont know what the processor speed is, but it has only 32mb ram and a 2gb harddrive, so Im guessing its fairly old.

At the moment it has win2000 professional on it - which takes up 3/4 of the hard drive and eats up most of the memory.

I know the laptop will never be great, but Im interested in getting it running as best as possible- mainly just for the challenge.

I have been thinking of 3 routes to take:
1/ speed up win2000 by removing certain things
2/ install windows 95/98
3/ install a small version of linux

I would like your advice on which would be the best route to take and basically which option would be likely to give me the best performance out of the computer - with the intention of using it as a word processor and if possible going on the internet occasionally.

Any Linux or BSD that agrees to install is OK.
Just make sure you don't install GNOME, KDE or Xfce. Those are hogs. You should pick a minimal window manager like IceWM or any of the "box" series. You are better off with a less user friendy thing (Debian, Slackware, any of the BSD) that doesn't break when you don't install a whole pile of useless gadgets. AbiWord is the light word processor of choice.

Web browsing.. Any usable browser will bring your system to a crawl
Use OffByOne in Windows or Dillo unix if you are OK with many webpages not working and looking funny.

You could use DOS.. There are WYSWYG word processors for DOS and a web browser too. Would take an enormous amount of tinkering to get it working though.

Windows 3.11?

All of the above applies when you want to run a GUI. You can so word processing and web browsing in a text console too, in which case any Linux would absolutely fly.

If you want optimum performace, I would install Gentoo. There are great walkthroughs on their website on getting the install going. One the base install is complete you will want a very lightweight window manager (since gnome and kde will be memory hogs) i recommend xfce

obviously you are not familiar with many linux applications...forget ubuntu and the main stream distros...install gentoo, a lightweight window manager, and you will load faster than win 2000, applications will launch faster, and you will not have as much memory and processor being wasted